WorkmanJones do nothing

A few weeks ago Jason Workman and I pulled the pin on a funded trip to the US scheduled for next year. Our practice has always included a critique of contemporary art and its development driven agenda. Several years ago we 'developed' the practice of free-dragging as a form of 'do-nothing' art. This morning I read this passage from Masanobu Fukuoka –

The more people do, the more society develops, the more problems arise. The increasing desolation of nature, the exhaustion of resources, the uneasiness and disintegration of the human spirit, all have been brought about by humanity's trying to accomplish something. Originally there was no reason to progress, and nothing that had to be done. We have come to the point at which there is no other way than to bring about a "movement" not to bring anything about. 1978 p159

I received an email from an artist last week advertising the 5 different shows that he was involved with this month. I have previously interviewed this artist for a column on ecological art practices and was made aware that his career development was superiorly more important than ecological crises.

Jason and I have spoken about our practice as 'no-practice', and that pulling the pin on flying to the US is contiguous with free-dragging; a practice of embracing hopelessness.

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Towards a biophysical poetry

Below is the title, introductory quote and first two paragraphs of my first substantial work since A Free-dragging Manifesto. It is soon to be published in Angelaki, the journal of the theoretical humanities, by Routledge in the UK.

Free-dragging, Slow Text and Permapoesis:
Towards a biophysical poetry

If language is of the world, like galaxies and ecosystems, this means it participates in what it represents, though how privileged it may be either as a representative or as a participant remains to be seen. Ira Livingston

I suppose it could go without saying that with every culture the interrelationships between food (survival) and art (living) are wholly understandable. To mark this point a friend and I, at an airport shop recently, wheeled a large stand of brightly coloured packets of potato chips ten metres across the floor to sit beside a large stand of brightly covered paperback books. This small, unplanned action was filmed and later published online as a free-to-air video poem called Best Sellers.

How we obtain our food directly informs our imaginative psyches and links our art to our food. In this essay I aim to make conscious the link between principles of agro-ecology and permaculture and a decapitalised and carbon fixed poetry – poetry that consciously and explicitly participates within a dynamic biosphere, not just in content but also in form. Just to be clear and ’fess-up here, when I made Best Sellers I was at an airport flying home from a festival where I had presented a paper that centred on art’s relation to carbon. In this work, I will begin with a premise based on the relocalisation of resources; present four theses identifying the material and social woes of ‘impermanent culture’; reference a fifth thesis proposed by anthropologist and activist David Graeber on the material and social woes of liberalism’s aggregate-growth model; show the transitional practices of ‘free-dragging’ and ‘slow text’ as examples of biophysical art (post John Cage); and posit the portmanteau, ‘permapoesis’, as a post-capitalist ethic that articulates an ecological mode of production for the arts.

You can read the entire work (with its specific formatting) here.

I especially thank commissioning editor Kate Fagan for her generous assistance, critique and clear-eye over this piece, as well as Ian Robertson, Meg Ulman, Hamish Morgan, Jason Workman and Peter O'Mara for their valuable suggestions and supportive peerage. I am also indebted to David Holmgren's incredible life's work and writing, as well as Derrick Jensen and David Graeber for their inspired thinking and activism.

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